Sunday, September 17, 2006

Weather

A couple months ago I mentioned two books about weather and global warming here: The Weather Makers (great but heavy reading, probably only adults will be able to plough through this) and An Inconvenient Truth (simple, fast, read, enough graphics to keep a motivated youth interested). Let me harp about this subject a bit more as it deserves it.

Check out The Economist's cover for September 9th: yes indeed, the heat is on.

Economist Leader, September 9th, 2006:

"Global warming, it now seems, is for real."

"...a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the risk of a climatic catastrophe is high enough for the world to spend a small proportion of its income trying to prevent one from happening."

Read the rest of the Leader here.

The rest of the special report is subscriber access only; try to find this issue at your local library if you don't subscribe.

A good resource for exploring weather (not specifically climate change or global warming) is BBC's Wild Weather. You can read about the series, and get a small glimpse of the dishy, zany host, here. It's divided into 4 episodes: hot, cold, wind, wet, each about an hour. There is footage of Hurricanes Andrew and Mitch, flash floods, monsoons, mudslides - every disaster associated with wild weather. The host goes into a wind tunnel, jumps from a plane, and wanders around a desert. He's very easy on the eyes and does some amazing stunts, guaranteed to appeal esp. to 8-12 year old boys. There is also an accompanying book.

Also check out the comprehensive Climate Change section at the BBC.

CBC has climate change resources here.

Go do something.

3 comments:

Andrea said...

Watching Inconvenient Truth is on our list of things to do for our homeschooling year this year. I didn't know there was a book. Have you watched the movie thing? How do they compare?

hornblower said...

No, I haven't seen the movie yet. From what I've heard though, it follows the book's format very closely. What annoys a lot of people about both the book & the film, is the Al Gore infomercial interspersed. Frankly, when I was reading the book, I skimmed those sections very quickly ....

Becky said...

I just started "Field Notes from a Catastrophe" by Elizabeth Kolbert over the weekend. Highly recommended, and no Al Gore lol (well, one mention on page 157 but that's it).

I miss our gift subscription to The Economist, sniff...

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